Steve Jobs Makes Secret Trip To New York To Wow Starstruck Media With iPad Demos

visited the Wall Street Journal and newsroom of the New York Times in recent days, say sources at the papers. Also, New York reports the Apple CEO showed up for a secret media dinner.

We’re reliably informed that Jobs showed up for an iPad show and tell in the Times newsroom. The meeting was strictly off the record, though a person present indicated Jobs is preparing to gear up the iPad for magazines and newspapers, having put books first on his list of priorities. Magazines and newspapers got short shrift during Jobs’ presentation to unveil the tablet computer last week.

Jobs also visited the Journal, a source there confirmed, though that meetings sounds decidedly less open than the Times affair. We’re told Jobs was confined to the third floor of the News Corp. building, where the cafeteria and gym are, and that many Journal staffers who wanted to see him, including even some higher-ups, could not. (The Journal newsroom starts on the fifth floor and goes up for several stories. Most of it is on the sixth floor.)

Meanwhile, New York’s Daily Intel broke news of an intriguing, top-secret dinner Jobs convened at Pranna in the Flatiron district. The sometime pescetarian dined with 50 New York Times Company executives in the cellar at Pranna, and sat with Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, according to Daily Intel. He showed off his new iPad and ordered off menu, getting a mango lassi and penne even though neither are normally served at the South Asian fusion spot.

More intriguing: Jobs showed up wearing “a very funny hat – a big top hat kind of thing,” said Daily Intel’s source. So apparently the obsessively secretive Apple chief was disguised as the Planter’s Peanut guy for his trip to Gotham, with his John Lennon spectacles replacing the Peanut’s usual monocle. We’re told, however, that Jobs was wearing no plutocratic hat or other headgear for his visit to the Times newsroom, which, given his already all-too-imperious image, is probably for the best.